Integration of the vacuum SCADA with CERN's Enterprise Asset Management system

With over 128Km of vacuum chambers, reaching pressures as low as in interstellar space, CERN is home to the largest vacuum system in the world. Its underlying architecture comprises approximately 15 000 pieces of control equipment, supervised and controlled by 7 Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) servers, and over 300 Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). Their configuration files are automatically generated from a set of ORACLE databases (vacDB) using a Java application (vacDB-Editor). The maintenance management of such an amount of equipment requires the usage of an Enterprise Asset Management system (EAM), where the life cycle of every equipment is tracked from reception through decommissioning. The equipment displayed in the vacuum SCADA is automatically integrated in its user interfaces (UIs) based on data available on vacDB. On the other hand, the equipment available in Infor-EAM for maintenance management activities (creation of work-orders, stock management, location tracking) resides in its own database. This leaves room for mismatches between what users see on the SCADA and in Infor-EAM. Although manual imports of equipment lists from vacDB to Infor-EAM are possible, the process is time consuming, error prone, and only guarantees the correcness of data while no equipment is added, deleted or modified in vacDB. Aiming to solve this issue, a web-based application called vacDM was developed to ensure continuous consistency between vacDB, Infor-EAM and CERN’s dictionary database for equipment descriptions, the naming-DB. Following the implementation of vacDM, the vacuum SCADA was updated to allow the generation of Infor-EAM work orders.